The invention relates to compositions and methods to treat neurological disorders or damage, in particular brain or CNS cancer.
The identification of self-renewing and multipotent neural stem cells (NSC) in the mammalian brain holds promise for the treatment of many neurological diseases and has yielded new insight into brain cancer (5-7). However, the NSC “ground state”—defined by the complete repertoire of pathways that govern NSC proliferation, self-renewal and differentiation—remains largely uncharacterized. The in vitro culture of embryonic or postnatal brain cells isolated from anatomic precursor compartments in serum-free conditions containing FGF and EGF results in the expansion of a rare subpopulation of precursor cells and the formation of floating clonogenic clusters termed neurospheres (8-10) (FIG. 1a,b). Analysis of these neurosphere cultures has made it possible to elucidate the individual roles of developmental signaling pathways including the PTEN, Bmi 1, Notch, Wnt and Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) pathways in neural precursor proliferation, in concert with the known functions of these pathways in vivo (11-15). Although the candidate gene approach has been successful at uncovering vital pathways in NSC biology, to date only a small set of highly-studied networks has been sampled.